


If I Could Just See It All

by kyanve



Series: Truce [4]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Gen, background past character death sort-of, canon-typical genocide/atrocity references, identity scramble, the komar was not fun kids, trigel flashbacks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 09:33:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,085
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15771405
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyanve/pseuds/kyanve
Summary: Pidge PoV, part of Truce and adjacent.Pidge gets to deal with her own chunks of not-her-memories and not-being-all-herself after the Komar, and drags through recovery trying to find some meaning to all of it.





	If I Could Just See It All

Something hit Voltron, and it was like everything was being ripped out from the inside; she wasn’t sure if it came more from her or Green. It only lasted for a moment before everything went black. 

The sky above was red and violet, a dusk that only rarely cleared to full day, red and dark stone sweeping in extravagant arcs shaped by volcanic pressure and weathering. The open area had scars across it, and she had to pick her path carefully across the scorched gouges dug into the earth. A handful of small drones hovered in a little cloud around her, darting in and out occasionally to map and collect readings. 

She stopped on the edge of a furrowed crater, a giant track gouged out by an amorphous foot. Her armor and the drones weren’t reporting anything immediately dangerous, so she swung down over the edge, sliding to the bottom. 

She had her computer up as soon as she had footing enough to keep her balance, only barely glancing up when the Red Lion passed overhead to land on the nearest edge of the plain, next to Green. There wasn’t much reason to pay much mind beyond that, not when there were more immediate worries.

Worries like the way the rock around her didn’t seem to have been compacted or dug out exactly; the porous structure of the volcanic rock was visible, as though the rock had been cut through or otherwise destroyed more than compacted down. 

Red armor slid down nearby, Alfor making his way to look over her shoulder while she was running closer scans on the rock. 

She nodded over one shoulder to him, most of her attention still on her readings; he stayed nearby. 

"Find anything?"

She watched the readings; the whole thing had her uneasy. "Not much." She let the screen go with a handwave - the sensors would continue to work. "You said you had an odd sense from the little one - as if there were something larger?"

He nodded. "It was alien enough to be hard to make sense of, but I had the feeling that if I tried to read too far, I'd be looking into something deeper." 

She narrowed her eyes back at the rock with a couple of unhappy, quiet clicks. "Well, so far I haven't found anything more than residue - definitely no sign of any remaining life forms." Green could've fit inside the gouge they were standing in. "I don't like it. The way it was behaving, I would've expected some of the smaller components to linger." 

"Maybe we convinced them it wasn't worth the effort." Alfor shrugged weakly; she gave him a sidelong glance with a raised eyebrow.

"Do you really believe that?"

He stared at the carved-out rock distantly. "...No." 

"I know we're not even sure those were sentient, but..." She stared at the rock, lips thin with a faint hiss. "I don't like this. If they were just reactive, then they would've come through as soon as the little one was trapped, not after it'd been in containment for an extended period - and any surviving fragments of the larger amalgam would still be here, scavenging the rock faces." 

"Or they'd have grouped together and moved out of sight." He folded his arms, drumming fingers on the vambrace of his armor. "I'll go fetch my own drones and see if there's anything suspicious in any of the nearby cave systems. We can cover more ground that way." He paused, tilting his head to give the lions perched above them a considering look. "It might also be worth seeing if Green has anything that'd help."

She followed his glance up; she still wasn't used to the flickers of something else in the back of her mind. "It's worth a shot." 

A part of her wanted to be even more suspicious - that there was some kind of connection between the great beasts and the thing that had attacked, that they'd just ended up in the middle of some kind of territorial squabble; that even though the presence in the machine felt bright and supportive, there'd be no way of knowing if that was a ruse - 

But the alarm at the assault had felt genuine enough. There'd been no signs of harm towards Alfor while he was working on them, nor any sign of real behavior change; the only signs of outside manipulation were sections of design where he was clearly taking outside dictation, unable to answer what particular systems or parts did when asked.

The battle had felt like they had a clue what was going on and were possibly more intent than anyone else to stop it before it could get a foothold, and the thing - things? - had reacted quickly, targeting them with more focus than anything else. 

Alfor and his people were the ones used to communicating with things; he was the best guideline so far for what to trust and what to worry about, and far more familiar with it than she was. 

"If we don't find anything..."

He stopped in the middle of turning to leave. "Hm?"

"If it _is_ intelligent, and it didn't decide it wasn't worth the trouble - then we need to consider that it might change tactics on us." She turned to face him. "Make sure she's monitoring for related energy signatures - I'd rather find out it was just some kind of glorified bacteria and be over-paranoid than assume it's gone and get ambushed because it found a way around our defenses."

Alfor nodded. "I'll check in with them both. It shouldn't be a hard sell, after how bad this almost was."

He took a quicker exit, abusing the armor's jetpacks, leaving her alone in the crater as everything blurred out black again.

She was walking down a darkened hallway; there were a couple of soldiers leading the way, but she would’ve known her way through the Galra warship blindfolded and spun in a circle. 

They stopped at a door in front of an observation deck; she walked in. The soldiers didn’t follow. 

She was unarmed and out of any substantial armor, weapons left behind her voluntarily after demanding to speak to Zarkon. Maybe it would buy time; it had confused them enough for attention to be off the wounded one.

Zarkon was in armor - but he rarely wasn’t in at least some form of armor when he wasn’t in private or significantly “off duty”. It took willpower to not flinch or react when he turned; he looked gaunt, thinner, skin stretched over his skull in sharp outlines of the bones beneath, eyes a featureless, unnatural glowing violet. His posture was less stiff, but more tense. 

It still felt like him somewhere in there, even if he was an angry, grieving, hurting mass; riled up like a wounded beast enough to have a hard time telling what was a threat and what wasn’t, filled out larger with something else. She stayed still, calm, not allowing any flinch; if her theory was right, then burying the list of reasons for there to be a fight for the moment might be their only chance to salvage things - and if it was wrong, she needed to keep him talking as long as possible to give Blaytz a chance.

“We thought you were dead.”

“So I’ve been told. I didn’t think I would manage to miss my own funeral.” The smile he gave at that was bitter and had too many teeth, and she knew Galra mannerisms too well to take it as actual humor. 

“Zarkon - I went over sensor logs of what happened; you really _shouldn’t_ be doing much - it’s unstable, but we think we figured out a way to heal it properly.” If she could get him listening and not treating them as a threat, then she might get leverage to get him to _stop_.

“And you didn’t bother to do that before?” He still had that habit of holding composure, but there was noticeable anger bleeding through, and she couldn’t deny that he had a right to some of it, knowing what he must have awakened to. She lowered her head, looking away, carefully minding what she let out - there was guilt, worry, some uncertainty, but certainty that the alternatives would’ve been worse. She’d seen the logs, she knew what had been building that they hadn’t known about; they’d done the best they could to salvage everything, and even though she’d had suspicions for a long time, she’d still been caught off guard. 

“Everything was going wrong; we didn’t have time, and we couldn’t leave your people there to die - your commanders wouldn’t allow us access.” There was a window in between but they hadn’t managed to decipher enough to do anything meaningful before the Galra demanded turning over their leaders. 

She kept the rest out of reach; she didn’t need to let it potentially feed into the warped logic he’d fallen into or set off his temper, especially not when she was unarmed.

He growled; it wasn’t a sound she heard him allow often, and she did flinch back.

“Zarkon - let us help you.” She was actually trying to project now; they did care, the Castle felt like a piece was torn out of it without him, they’d been worried more and more for years now, she was here unarmed and putting herself at-mercy to not let go of whatever chance there might still be, she remembered all the years they’d spent together and how much he’d done for all of them. 

Everything he’d helped build that he was starting to destroy. She’d been around enough to have learned long ago to convincingly blank out and filter the rest out; if she got him to stand down, there’d be time for that later.

“I think you’ve all ‘helped’ _enough_.” He snarled, teeth bared, claws extending under his gauntlet gloves, then turned and stalked away a few feet, shoulders hunched, everything closed off except for the distorted sense of roiling, betrayed hurt, confusion and pain that had festered into into bitter hatred.

She took a couple steps forward, careful to make noise, careful to keep her intentions open, reaching out to catch his arm with one hand. “Please, stop pulling away-“

There was a louder snarl, and just from the way the coiled spring of anger suddenly exploded, she knew she’d made a mistake; there was something else now that the tension had snapped, another energy mixed with his own that she recognized-

The sound of the bayard activating only sank in after the sudden sudden shock of pain as the blade went through her chest; she could briefly pick up on him letting up his own shields finally, after. The starry expanse he’d always been on the relay was darker, grief and vengeful malice snarling back against her attempt at reaching out. 

Everything went to nothing too quickly for her to tell if there was any flicker of remorse. 

It was disorienting to go from the fade-out and pain of one presence made of starfields gone murderous to another that was digging in to drag back to life, even if one of them had an undercurrent of something _wrong_ that she couldn’t decipher now that she was Pidge again while the other was familiar, protective, and comforting. 

In fact, it was hard to think much at all beyond little dregs of panicked survival instinct; hollowed out, drained dry, stripped down to nothing but a few bits of the most important things - her friends, her team, the people that depended on her, her father, her brother. 

For a moment, feeding power into the lion felt like even that would drain away, pouring the last of her being into Green like desperately throwing the last bits of water in a desert on a withered and browned plant.

Then there was a faint sense of light, a pulse of life, and everything flooded back a little too bright, too stark, too aware, shoved back together all at once and _alive_ with a purpose and with awareness of everyone else, lion and pilot alike, desperately clinging to the threads between them as their bits and dregs led the lions’ power back to them. 

**************************

Adrenaline didn't carry that far after finding the Black Lion empty. Exhaustion was most of her composure as Coran herded them all into the emergency shelter space; she knew some of the panicked worry wasn't hers, but it was hard to detangle which was which in between obvious little spikes that she could only identify after they'd drifted out. The deja-vu fear that whatever they found wouldn't be Shiro wasn't hers, she knew it, and while she wasn't sure what'd happened, she knew it'd been different from whatever had happened to Zarkon.

Shiro wasn't Zarkon. The Black Lion wouldn't have thrown him into something like that, they would find him again, and he would still be himself. 

She was beyond sick of losing people, and repeating that to herself felt like the only way to stave off that collapsing in on itself.

Shoving away the shock of Shiro's disappearance didn't entirely help, not when the alternative was a sharp moment of a different kind of trauma, an echoed pain through her chest and a looming, hollow _nothing_. 

She tried to focus on what Coran was saying as he was pointing out where things were in the emergency shelter, but even that was a lost cause; while it registered when Coran was herding them all to corners and recruiting Slav and Kolivan to help with supplies, blankets, and cushions, the last thing that actually registered was sitting down next to Hunk with one of the first blankets dug out of storage.

She woke up later clinging to Hunk with Lance draped over the both of them in an awkward sprawl of limbs. The sense of other presences close by was louder, harder to ignore between contact and how strung out she was; between the aftermath of that fight and her predecessor’s too-vivid memories nipping at her heels, she vehemently didn’t want to move away from people. She curled up, burrowing in more in between the both of them, clinging to the sense of other living presences. 

More than anything else, she didn't want to be alone right now. 

She ended up dozing, in and out of weird, fragmented nightmares that weren't entirely hers, with glimpses of a place that seemed partly made of colossal living greenery, civilization wedged in among something that rejected any pretense of control - 

And all of it was burning, Galra drones sweeping through ruins that sometimes had bits of Earth in among them, a tangled mush of dead family and _home_ burning. When the shards of nightmares weren't apocalyptic, they were somehow worse; a much more familiar feel to Zarkon setting off the violence, Shiro with violet eyes in echoes of nightmares she'd overheard and blundered into before. The parts of the nightmares that ended with dying to one or the other were worse now that there was an actual sense of what dying was _like_ to feed into it. 

When she woke up again, it took a couple seconds to register that Hunk was awake - he was staying still and stubbornly wadded in part of the blankets, staring off into the dark shelter. 

She grumbled unintelligibly, burrowing into the blankets further next to him. 

"Yeah. I feel that," Hunk mumbled. He looked like he'd barely slept, even though she knew he'd been out at least as much as she had; they probably all looked like Hell still. 

She didn't want to be alone, and she wanted to get all of it out of her head somehow, but she wasn't sure she wanted to talk about it, or what to start with or where. It was hard not to've gotten some awareness of mortality back even just when Kerberos was announced lost; as stubbornly sure as she'd been that Matt and her dad were still alive out there, she'd had to go through funerals and mourning everywhere, with that nagging fear snapping at her heels that maybe they actually were gone. The war with the Galra hadn't helped, either, just added more violence to it. 

The 'but what if' nightmares had been bad enough before the reality of her predecessor's memories had been added to them. 

"Stupid nightmares." She hunched in so that she was a little more engulfed in the blankets next to him.

"You can say that again." Hunk was definitely tired and frustrated. "So what were yours?" It was flatter and had less energy to it than the normal fishing he did - the kind that was more nervous rattling than anything else. "Galra destroying everything too? Because I think I've gotten just about every variation on that, with nightmares about Earth, and the Balmera, and the other planets we've stopped on, and a bunch I'd never even seen before. I'd really like to see more of those, just not when they're all on fire." 

Hunk’s nervous-babble did make it a little easier to just bounce off of it without thinking as hard about everything. “The dying part sucks too. I didn’t _need_ to know what dying’s like.” 

Hunk made a quiet unhappy noise and tugged at her, tangled blanket mess and all, to cling to her as if she were some kind of weird teddy bear. At first it seemed like Lance would sleep through it, just shifting around to adjust, then there was a tired, grumpy mumble as he cracked an eyelid.

“Whups. Sorry.” Hunk wasn’t moving to put Pidge back where she’d been. 

Lance mumbled something else unintelligible and shifted to sit up, leaning on Hunk’s shoulder.

Things were awkwardly, uncomfortably quiet for a while, nobody wanting to move and the brief conversation falling flat. There was the buzzing of a hundred things Pidge wanted to know more about or ask about, but not even enough energy to think about them to pin anything down; she was steamrolled flat and disoriented still. 

The emergency shelter being dark enough to not see well made perfect sense, the emergency shelter being dark enough that she couldn’t see well was some kind of unnatural obnoxious affront and a sign something was wrong. Hunk being bigger didn’t feel that wrong, but being smaller than _everyone_ did. She should be taller, she should have claws, her teeth were wrong, just about everything was wrong. 

She was starving but didn’t want to move, too. 

Eventually “starving” won out and she drug herself out of the blankets and upright enough to shamble over to the storage containers with the packaged emergency rations. She wasn't really thinking about what she grabbed enough to even check if she could read any of the Altean on the labels, and the pouches she retreated with had Altean about third down on the label, anyway. She burrowed her way back into the blankets, propped up against Hunk. 

She was pretty sure Coran had said somethinabout there being nothing in the crates he'd brought out that might be dangerous for humans, so it wasn't like it really mattered anyway. Humans were broad-diet garbage disposals. It was a useful talent. 

Whatever it was, it was incredibly sweet with about the consistency and amount of flavor of applesauce, which was probably just as well - she wasn't sure how well she trusted her stomach to be on speaking terms with food after everything. She was exhausted, and there were layers to it, as if finding the other end of the thread of Everything and bringing it together had brought all ten thousand years of history between then and now to bear on her. 

There was something Green and her predecessor had been chasing that was too little, too late, but her predecessor's attention in the more vivid memories hadn't been on it specifically enough for her to know it now. It left her with the frustrating feeling that there was some kind of an explanation for why everything was the way it was, but it was just out of her reach, buried somewhere under ten thousand years of dust and genocide. Layered over that was a different angle; she still didn't have much for solid images or more than academic knowledge that the old Paladins had _been_ close once, but there was a slow-bleeding weight, a deep broken ache. She would've expected more outrage, more anger, but the sense of betrayal was a painful kind of frustration, overwhelmed by mourning - _everything_. 

What the universe had been. What the old team had been. Even Zarkon himself, even if Zarkon had dug his own grave. 

It was hard not to think about how much of Coran's chatter involved bits of worlds that might be dead, wildlife that might be extinct, things from "Back In The Old Days". The secondhand garbled echo was bad enough; how much worse was it to have gone through that and wake up ten thousand years later to everything having only gotten worse? 

She wasn't sure where he was; he wasn't in the shelter room - probably out doing repairs somewhere. She hoped he wouldn't mind getting hugged out of nowhere when she was feeling more up to walking around and less frustrated with not being able to see in the dark.

She was exhausted even though she didn't really feel like sleeping; she curled up more against Hunk and around Lance flopped across, letting the dull layers of everything she didn't have the energy to think about or the first idea how to handle fade out into a blur until she managed to fall asleep again.

The blurry mush had some bits that weren't nightmares - little bits of something else, happier memories that fell apart into in indistinct haze of grief. Sometimes it bled into the nightmares, juxtapositions of Zarkon and Shiro turning on them, sometimes she just woke up from it to the fuzzy sense there'd been something worth missing she couldn't quite make out. She wasn't sure which was worse. 

When she was awake it was hard to tell if the others were awake or not sometimes. Others, they were curled up in a huddle, flat and worn out and quiet, as if saying something might enforce reality so they couldn't just wake up from it like any other of the nightmares. 

Then Lance hit something closer to awake. “…So we won, right?” He sounded flat and doubtful. “Because it doesn’t really feel like it.” 

Hunk made a noise too tired and flat to be frustrated. “I dunno. We got Zarkon. That’s something, I guess.” 

The Castle was a wreck on low power. All of them were doing different forms of death warmed over, including Allura, Coran and Slav were subdued when they weren’t absent working on repairs, and she was pretty sure Kolivan’s periodic absence was getting recruited. 

She hadn’t really known Antok, either - it’d been kind of awkward, although he’d seemed entertained by her occasional fits of curious lurking and trying to nose around; now it was another weird missing space that wasn’t close or a big part of her life, but still something Just Gone, where there’d never be any answers but there would be a blank space around Kolivan. 

No sign of Shiro or any explanation what’d happened to Shiro. She wanted to think about that right now less than the memory of dying that kept bleeding into things. She was still learning a lot of the weirder energy and magic dynamics and mechanics around the lions - she’d never thought she’d be dealing with “Magic” in the sense of catching up to something that was very much its own serious science - but what little she knew didn’t look great. 

Green was still quiet, down for the count in the back of her head and not up to responding to much of anything. 

“This sucks.” Lance was sinking into Hunk’s side and the blankets, and Pidge couldn’t really argue with his assessment of everything. 

On top of all of the normal bruises and aches that came from a hard battle, there were layers of bone-deep exhaustion, and the weird throbbing ache that went from just a little below her collarbone dead-center, filling part of her chest and back. It was hard to avoid the memory, and she wasn’t sure if that was better or worse than dwelling on their current dismal holding pattern. 

It didn’t make sense, and she knew a lot of that was it being too out of context to know the history; in both bits of memory, she’d gotten exactly what her predecessor had been feeling and thinking about at the time. People didn’t normally think about the larger history to whatever was going on in front of them when they were busy. 

“…Do you think - maybe part of it was the lions were trying to tell us something?” 

There was an awkward pause as both of the boys shifted to give her a dubious look.

“I’m serious. We all heard little bits of this before we tried that first time, and they were trying to warn us that Zarkon could get on the relay and get in our heads. There was also that time back just before Shiro managed to block him out; they were all kind of screaming it at him and it seemed to help - maybe they’d been helping make sure he stayed out and had things we needed to know, but whatever we got hit with made it all go weird.” 

Lance was weirdly pensive at that.

“So…” She didn’t really want to deal with it, but at the same time, if she could make it useful or learn something from it - “Did you guys see anything other than - how they died?”

There was another couple moments of awkward, horrified silence, both of them going through a range of faces where she could actually feel the echo of her own discomfort with the entire subject. 

“Uh. Well, there was something with Blue? It was a fight with some kind of weird blobby shadowmonster - all horror movie reject only Godzilla sized.” Lance stared at the ceiling. “It kinda sounded like us figuring everything out… it tried to engulf Blue. Kinda felt like that thing we got hit with, the way getting shocked by a light socket feels like getting hit by lightning, I guess.” 

Pidge frowned. “…Where was it?” If the lions were trying to tell them something - or if the lions were remembering something like the Komar - then maybe it was related to what she’d seen. 

“I dunno. There was some kind of city nearby that kinda looked Galra they were trying to keep it away from? There was a lot of dark red rock with tunnels and holes in it, and the sky was sorta dark red and purple, like there was a haze and it was late or something.” 

It was the same planet; she was certain of it in a way that went beyond matching descriptions and logic. 

“Hunk?” He was the only other one awake and accessible to ask, after all, and she wasn’t sure when there’d be a good chance to ask Keith about what Red might’ve barfed out about it. 

“No help here. I got everybody dragging around the infirmary beat up pretty bad and Zarkon trying to fuss at everything, even though he was a mess too.” Hunk leaned back against the wall with a thump. “Just depressing, no big mystic clues.” 

That made her stop and re-evaluate a little; she tried to nudge Green for input, but got almost nothing - just a brief pained flicker of plaintive sulking before passing back out. 

“…Anybody else’s lion down for the count hard?” It was probably obvious, but worth asking for the sake of chewing on the continued puzzle.

Hunk nodded with a worried noise, and Lance just shot her a tired look. 

She settled in, worming around where Hunk was still hugging her to get comfortable. “I dunno. I guess part of it must’ve been association with whatever was on the lions’ minds when they got hit… Green’s always got sensors running, Blue remembered getting hit before, and Yellow…” 

Hunk looked upset and a little queasy even through the exhaustion; Yellow had apparently just been mourning what’d been lost. If Keith were up to answering, Red and Alfor’s memory probably would’ve had useful input, but she knew better than to poke that bear - Keith would’ve been hit the hardest by Shiro’s disappearance. It would’ve been a dick move to poke him about whatever of Alfor’s memories besides dying he got dropped on him, and if she did she’d earn the snap-back it’d probably get from him. 

“Okay, so. Mine that wasn’t the dying part was pretty early, in some kind of weird gouged out crater from some fight with something big… which was probably the thing Lance saw the old Paladins fighting. She was out with sensor drones looking for traces and pieces that might’ve escaped - it sounded like it was some kind of aggregate collective of smaller organisms. There wasn’t any sign of it there but she thought maybe it was smart enough to’ve pulled back to change tactics….” 

There were a lot of other little things that stuck out as important, but she was too tired to do more than work out the general outline; they could fill in details later.

“She called it an amalgam, and something about how they’d had a little one and it hadn’t shown up when the little one got caught - so she thought it might’ve been smart enough to wait before coming through, and smart enough to not try another direct assault after they beat it back.” 

“I don’t like the sound of this,” Hunk grumbled. 

“Me neither.” Lance shifted to flop across Hunk, more of a sprawl with less intent of moving. “Do we have to figure this out now?”

Pidge sighed. “…Even if we weren’t half dead I don’t think we _know_ enough to figure it out.” 

“Great. No creepy monsters for now.” 

Sleep wasn't much of a respite, and her attempts at holding herself together and keeping going fell apart like a too-wet sand castle built in the shallows. 

The nightmares were awful - places that shouldn't have been familiar that achingly were burning, racing to get civilians out where the exhausted blur wasn't sure if they should be human or something else that was too familiar for a name to come to mind. The sick malaise of shock and betrayal, a bone-deep hurt almost too profound to be real, knowing there should be anger but having it only come out garbled in a panicked need to get it all to _stop_ , for things to stop being wrong, knowing everything was unraveling and dying and that it'd been too far gone to stop by the time anyone had realized it was happening. 

A tired, haggard Alfor, older with his own cloud of shock and despair hanging over him like a second cloak, "Just take them and _go_ , we _can't_ risk them being taken, I can't, I couldn't keep him _out_ -", staring down the rifles of Galra drones that'd always been allies, a bleeding weight draped over one shoulder, someone that'd been safe and trusted twisted into a mummified, snarling husk.

The other dreams were almost worse; Zarkon, whole and healthy and _young_ , half-dressed and sputtering - "What are you _doing_ in _my room?!_ How did you even get in here?!", the whole thing layered with smug entertainment tainted over with a veneer of loss. 

"No, the Altean is not a spy, he's just an idiot with no survival instinct or impulse control." 

 

A hundred little broken bits of Zarkon blocking a gunfire filled hallway with his shield, Zarkon carrying one or another of them wounded, a group of others almost too familiar to need names at ease with laughter and concern and gentle teasing, that always ended up bleeding back into the sickened pit of grief and glowing unnatural violet eyes, the sharp cut-off pain as everything just... stopped. 

It almost made it hard to eat when she was awake, the broken sense of loss and absence and betrayal tangled up with the dim rooms and people missing, _Shiro_ missing, trying not to think about Slav's panicked comment about no longer being in a reality where they all made it out alive. 

Being sure she should be able to see better, to see more colors, that she should be taller, that her entire body was wrong, that most of the food bars would be nauseating at best... none of that helped either, and fitful sleep drug everything back into a haze of battered-down misery.

She did remember Lance getting up to get something and returning without his jacket, then her own jags of tired grief and panic about Shiro's absence suddenly getting louder, sharper, deeper, and echoed; they'd all kind of shambled toward the broken sobbing that went along with it, even if she was low-ebbed enough to have been half-conscious for it and to fall back asleep clinging around Keith's feet as if it'd somehow do something or mean something. 

Exhaustion finally blended the dreams and memory of dying and horrible dragging weight of loss into more of a slurried haze, passed out too hard to even process that much for a while. When she finally woke up enough to really be aware, it was with just enough energy to feel like she was going to break somehow if she didn't find _something_ to focus it on that wasn't all the various little spiraling threads of what happened to her predecessor and what'd just happened to them. 

She squirmed out of the blankets, taking stock of the room. She'd never really gone through the shelter, but there was a quiet familiarity to it, as if it'd been a place she'd been often; if she focused on that, there were little bits and pieces more that stood out - where there was a maintenance compartment that had enough room for blankets and pillows to sleep in, which storage compartments in the wall had tools, which had other supplies, which one had been repurposed for sanity.

She went around the room, opening doors to check. 

There were the tools, some of them things she hadn't seen in this life where she wasn't sure if she'd be able to just pick them up and use them or risk losing a finger.

There were the other supplies, most of the crates moved out to the floor where they'd be easier to go through.

There were quiet voices, other people in the room talking, and after a while she had Lance and Hunk restlessly tagging along, occasionally asking what she was looking at or what was going on; her voice only half felt like hers when she answered, stumbling over explanations uncertainly.

Finally she just started focusing on the room around her. The funny feeling of being in the wrong body wasn't going away, but if she focused on little things - the metal under her hand, the quiet whisper of the air purification systems, the way Lance was leaning over her shoulder - she could shake some of it, finding something closer to being awake again and feeling more like _herself_.

Or a "self" that wasn't a little taller than Alfor with way better night vision than humans, at least. 

"So I did manage to figure out what was in all the other compartments, or remembered or something, but it's weird with this one." She tapped the metal hatch with one hand, Lance and Hunk both watching. "It doesn't feel like there's anything useful here, but it's important somehow? Like it was a big deal that it was here and whatever was in it was both not worth commenting on and pretty important."

Hunk looked between her and the cabinet. "..Well, it is like...ten thousand year old memories. Maybe dying scrambled some of it? Not that it's been wrong so far, I did the getting around here without thinking thing too and only just thought about it that I've never been down here before, but even just identifying parts of it is pretty big and weird when you think about it." 

"...So are you gonna open it?" Lance nodded the cabinet.

She tilted her head at it. "I guess that is the only way to find out." 

She wasn't sure what she was expecting - old keepsakes, pictures, journals, mementos from home...

It took a bit of jiggling to get the door open, like it was stuck from the other side.

And then, it came open with a click, everything that'd been piled up against it falling out in a mess; it'd all just been shoved in haphazardly in a hurry rather than properly stowed. 

Lance and Hunk both yelled, jumping back, and she yelled, falling flat on her back staring at the ceiling with a mess of ten thousand year old clutter she hadn't even gotten a good look at all around her, a couple odd cards fluttering down slowly. 

It was the weirdest, least dignified jarring return to present reality ever, and she was trying to figure out what her life had become when she snapped out of the daze to Allura laughing; it was a little brokenly hysterical, but it was laughter, which had to count for something with how awful everything had been.

Pidge sat up, blinking; Lance was staring at a patterned card with a raised eyebrow, and Hunk was balancing on one foot in mid-cringe. "...This stuff isn't going to blow up or anything is it?"

It actually took her a second to place the quiet, gravelly, muffled laughter that was there for a second as coming from _Kolivan_ , and she was starting to worry about Allura remembering to breathe. 

One of the pieces was right in front of her, a weird twisted mess of colored metal in an almost-cube that .... 

Was familiar, and not in the 'someone else's memory' way. She picked it up, staring at the get-the-pieces-apart brain teaser that would've looked right at home next to fifty others like it on shelves around the house. 

"...Are these...puzzles?” She gave Allura a helpless look; Coran was out of the room, so Allura was the best person to ask, and easier to approach than Kolivan even if the old Blade did also seem to recognize some of it.

It took Allura a couple false starts to manage to catch her breath enough to speak. “And old games, yes.” The princess sat up straighter, propping her elbows on her knees; the manic laughter seemed like something she’d needed, even if she did still look almost as haggard and exhausted as they did. “To my knowledge this room was never used for its proper purpose in my father’s time, but they would occasionally come here to dodge attention.” 

It was an odd juxtaposition, between stories passed down and legends, even the way Allura spoke of her father and their brief encounter with the possessed hologram, with someone else’s memory while sitting in the middle of a pile of games and toys that looked like a giant version of one of her old road trip bags. There were a few little figurines of people in armor that reminded her of her brother’s lazily half-painted miniatures they’d used as D&D tokens, cards with emblems on them and symbols, little tiles with symbols that matched one or another of the boards scattered around, and about twenty variations on puzzles she recognized along with a few that were only familiar in distant secondhand.  
It was also entirely a mess, and she started trying to gather it up; at the very least sorting it out meant having something to do for a while. the individual take-apart type puzzles were the first thing she pulled out and gathered to put back in the cabinet; she'd probably come back for them later, maybe kidnap a few to her room, but for the time being they were just.... everywhere and she didn't really feel like that kind of focus. Hunk and Lance started picking things up themselves, sorting cards and game pieces into piles of things that looked similar.

And then she tripped over a chess knight. 

She stared at it, eyes narrowed. She didn't _need_ her predecessor's memory to know why that was there. She knew it was Alfor's fault, and had no problem remembering the Sphinx and its trials. She could actually pick out the rest of the pieces scattered in with everything, and started picking them up with barely contained fury, counting out the pieces with a steady stream of muttered profanity that occasionally included "fucking Sphinx", " _Alfor_ ", and "fucking trials". 

There was a little bit of intrusion from secondhand memory, and it was the conviction that Alfor thinking the trials were _fun_ was Incredibly Alfor, and Alfor was Like That. She dimly noticed that she was getting a look of increasingly confused and uncertain concern from Allura, but she chose to ignore it; Allura had missed out on the entire thing Coran and Kythylian had put them through, and Pidge was definitely feeling too exhausted for storytime. 

Allura was distracted anyway, glancing at something else that moved and suddenly turning subdued and withdrawn; Pidge tracked that, looking over to the other side of the room.

Kolivan had picked up a board that’d fallen near him. 

It was Zarkon’s, she knew that, and it had a blurry haze of fond memories attached, dimly lit rooms with quiet odd-hour conversations over the clicking of pieces. 

Kolivan was studying it pensively. He didn't have the secondhand memories the rest of them were wrestling with, or the personal connection to the lions and their history, which had to make it more surreal, especially since he was occasionally gathering up the small stones that'd scattered out of it thoughtfully, as though they were familiar. 

Zarkon was some kind of weird horrific demigod at this point, and some of what they were around now was personal effects of his, little things from back when he'd been someone like them. 

She thought about going over to ask, but Keith had shrunk in as if he were using Kolivan as a bulwark between himself and everything else; Keith still looked worse than the rest of them, small and lost and dazed, and she still had the impression that trying to go too close would cause him to disappear. More than that, she wasn't even sure how to approach it - 'I think I might know how to play this from my ten thousand year dead predecessor who used to play with Zarkon all the time' just... didn't seem like something she wanted to blurt out at a time like this. 

She went back to gathering up the game boards, getting most of it stuffed back in the cabinet hopefully in a way that was less likely to attack the next person to open it. 

The chess pieces were buried in the bottom of the cabinet with their board, and Pidge layered a couple other things on top to be sure they weren't likely to drop out to haunt her again anytime soon. She'd tuned out everyone else, managing to forget there were people almost until there was the tingling sense that something was about to Go Wrong attached to Lance's voice, addressed to Allura.

"So, any chance you'd know any games with these? Like, Altean poker or something?" 

Allura blinked, off-guard. "Well, of course - I think. What is Poker?" 

Pidge sighed, and turned to wander over and ... probably help Hunk with making sure it didn't end up turning into something ridiculous and stupid, today, she didn't feel up to instigating and encouraging Shenanigans right now. 

****************************

Keith was still being avoidant by the time she was feeling a little better and more mobile, but there wasn't much opportunity to poke at it; Coran was quick to recruit her and Hunk to help with repairs, a massive job that should've had an entire team to work on it. He and Slav had made impressive progress, but the Castle was a big ship, and it'd taken a vicious beating. 

She was still tired and frazzled herself, trying to avoid thinking about things, and it was easy to just lapse into a routine of working on the Castle, then passing out curled up with Hunk and Lance in the shelter. 

Besides, Keith wasn't avoiding Kolivan as much, so at least someone could keep an eye on him.

It left her with more time to mull over other things that were still nagging as distractions from Shiro's absence, a giant gap she wasn't quite ready to face or deal with yet. It helped that there was something nagging again about her predecessor's memories that felt like it was important, even if she was staring at a corner piece of blue and some random middle blue piece and nothing else of the puzzle. 

What Hunk had gotten with Zarkon fussing over everyone while they were injured was sticking out again, compared to how her predecessor had died. There’d been some kind of misdirection going on there; the old Green Paladin had been focusing hard on how close they’d been and worry to cover over something else, and all Pidge remembered was edges and bits of betrayed hurt on a profound level - probably more than would be explained by one of the others being wounded and her trying to buy them time. 

Coran had said something about the Castle having been made when he was a kid, and six hundred years between that and when they’d ended up in stasis, so Alteans lived pretty long; it brought up a lot of questions about relative lifespans, aging rates, and maturation rates that were more than she had the energy to think about right now. The important part was that the old generation had been together for probably at least five hundred years, in each other’s heads and depending on each other. 

Not only had they trusted Zarkon as much as anyone else there, but Zarkon had worried about them - it wasn’t some kind of one sided thing. 

The violet eyes had been new to the old Green Paladin, and she’d had to cover a recoil from - what Pidge was USED to Zarkon looking like; now that she was awake it was hard to grasp at the comparison, but what they were dealing with was apparently mummified and dessicated compared to how he’d looked before. 

There was a huge mess of things; Zarkon’s violet eyes and flagrant defiance of all laws of reality, him looking like a ‘walking corpse’ after whatever happened, the Druids, the weird aggregate void things, the Komar, Trigel’s vague paranoia early on and how it hadn’t just been buying time, it’d felt like she really did think there was a chance to drag some shred of the Zarkon they’d fought alongside back or at least get him to stop turning on everyone. 

Did Coran know about her worries? Alfor obviously had been in on it from the beginning, and he'd been incredibly close with Coran. 

She had to cringe now at the memory of how she’d been the one the most uncomfortable with their earliest training and how much Coran had been emphasizing them working as a unit and trusting each to her with everything. It was one thing to know there’d been some long time where the previous paladins had been their friends and family, another to get hit over the head with the actual memory of it, to know what Coran had been working alongside and watched fall apart. 

Of course he wanted them to be a stable group; nobody would want to risk going through that again. 

She felt bad in a way about trying to catch him about it, and chickened out a few times, walking in and blurting out the first system she'd been trying to work on that might need a double-check to hide behind so she wouldn't have to say the real reason she was tracking him down at odd hours when there weren't other people around. If Coran noticed, he never let on, and she got thanked for her diligence in helping get the Castle working again a few times.

It made her feel guilty for trying to avoid the subject, which she felt guilty about trying to bring up because she knew it had to still be painful for him.

Finally, she walked through the door, catching him without Slav or someone else there, and swallowed down the urge to dodge again. "Coran? there's - something I need to talk to you about." 

Coran paused, looking up from his small screen; he'd been curled up on one of the couches in one of the lounge rooms, one foot propped up on the back of it. "Yes?"

"It's... when we were hit by the Komar. Something - really weird happened?" She shuffled her feet, rubbing the back of her head and stepping a little further into the room, waiting for the door to close behind her. "It... we all... got bits of memory. Not ours. Some of it was kinda random, and some of it... wasn't." She couldn't quite bring herself to 'we all saw how your friends died', not yet. 

"Ah. Yes, that." Coran was trying for the normal played-off unfazed, but there was a falter in it. "You're not the first one to bring it up, actually - I heard about it from Allura after Lance asked her about something." He was flipping through whatever he was reading, but Pidge could imagine how charged _that_ had to've been, since it would've meant Allura realizing Keith had seen her father's memories. "Also I checked to make sure Keith was eating a couple quintents after it happened... I don't think he woke up at all, really, but he did mumble something at me in Altean about being a godsend and ate it anyway. Not a Keith habit." The nonchalance was more strained at that.

“…Yeah.” She shuffled again. “It’s… there was something that both Lance and I got, about some kind of - weird shadow monster made up of smaller parts? Lance got a bit of the actual fight, and I got something just after.” She frowned; Coran had glanced up, listening. “…Lance said that the - memory of it trying to chew on Blue felt a little bit like the Komar, just a lot weaker, and… the original Green Paladin didn’t think it was gone - she thought the way it’d acted was suspicious, that it was intelligent and there was malice and forethought going on. That it was planning, and might be changing tactics after they beat it.” 

Coran frowned, dismissing his screen, folding his hands in front of him. “…She mentioned. Wasn’t something that overlapped with my field much, so it was mostly her and Alfor conspiring. Didn’t get very far either, since there wasn’t anything to work with past the lions’ sensor readings from the fight and what little’d been gleaned before. Eventually enough time had passed with nothing happening that it just turned into a sort of theoretical thing they’d chew on when there wasn’t anything better to do.” He shrugged tiredly. 

It was what Green had thought of when the Komar hit, and it still stuck out, the bright violet of Zarkon’s eyes and how much that’d unnerved her predecessor. “So…what if she was right after all? What if it - was intelligent, just. You know. Smart enough to lie low and not do anything they might notice until they’d given up, or find some other way to interfere they wouldn’t notice?” 

Coran closed his eyes, brows knitting. “I suppose anything is possible.” 

He sounded skeptical, and she was definitely treading on nerves, even if he was doing a good job mostly of stomping down reactions. 

“It -” She was fumbling with too few pieces and the big ones that stuck out. “She was trying to talk Zarkon down when she died, convince him to let them help, and things had already gone wrong - she thought there was enough chance something could be fixed that it was worth gambling her last chance on it, but I didn’t get enough to know what she thought she could help him _with_. Do you think - maybe it’d been manipulating him? …Might - still be?”

Coran’s frown turned to a scowl, and he stiffened; there was a visible transition as he shook his head, working to shove some of the tension out and not snap. “It wouldn’t have been possible before - Alfor managed to prove that the lions could block and interfere with outside influence, and that they’d notice if something tried. Zarkon dug that hole _himself_.”

 _Wouldn’t_ have been possible _before_. “…Before what?” 

Coran opened his mouth, then closed it, shaking his head sharply.

“I - I’m sorry. I can’t -” He took a deep breath, dragging some composure back together. “I need some time to think. We can talk about this later?” 

The request was almost pleading. 

She didn’t have enough pieces, and as much as she wanted to shake him for answers, her conscience kept dragging her back; pushing wouldn’t do any good. She nodded, even if it was unhappy. “…Yeah. Later.” She shifted weight, looking away. “I’m. Gonna go see about that busted power relay a few decks over. Maybe I can get it working.” Another awkward shift. “…Sorry.” 

She ducked out, going back to work before there was time for anything else.

There was tired concern and a sense of Green trying to fuss at her; the lion was just starting to groggily wake up, and definitely recognized and knew what was bothering her, but it was too jumped to make any sense of, a garbled mass of too much detail on too many things with too much nuance that didn’t translate to human senses. The lion finally settled on the mental equivalent of flopping over on her, something else tired and still hurting a bit and Connected that wanted to help and wanted her to rest.

She hated the feeling there was something else out there after them, potentially something that might’ve succeeded at destroying their predecessors - but whatever the lion knew it was sure there was time to figure things out without pushing it.

She just needed to work on what was in front of her, what she _could_ do something about, until things started making sense again.


End file.
